A review of “101 reasons why evolution is true”. Part 1

I want to review each reasons this particular site gives in support of evolution and evaluate the logic behind each one to see if the reasons truly support the theory of evolution. I’ll list each reason in purple and then evaluating the statement below that. Click here to read the list for yourself on the original site. The original site has links for each jargon to wikipedia articles.

As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said: “Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Let’s see if that’s true.

1.Lithologic Stratigraphy

The Earth’s crust has layers. Some of these layers are from the decomposition of sediment, others come from chemical precipitation, others from decaying organic matter, and others from volcanic lava. The reason we can see the layers is because they were formed in different ways.

The Earth has layers like onions have layers. (Read with a Shrek voice 😂) So I suppose we should dig deep to find the Earth’s true nature? 🤔 Joking aside, this point only states the make up of the Earth’s crust, and lends support to the old age of the Earth, since of course it is logical that hundreds of these layers are going to be formed after a fair bit of time!

Something I find as a recurring theme within the Young earht creationist vs evolutionists debates, is because it is easy to demonstarte the old age of the Earth, then this by default means the Evolutionists’ narrative is the more correct one. As if there are only two sides to this debate and not other possibilities such as a creationist model within an old earth.

2.Law of Superposition

Layers are laid down on top of each other, with the bottom layers laid down first and the top layers laid down last; therefore, the layers on the bottom are the oldest and the ones on the top are the youngest.

There’s nothing to evaluate here, this point is a plain fact. ,_, Of course within the evolutionary narrative this point is narrative because when the fossil record is examined, it is interpreted that the organisms in one era give rise to the organisms in the next era and so forth while slowly dying out to become extinct.

Honestly, if a population of a species got isolated from the main group and then changed over time while the old group went extinct, then how could evolutionists even say the old group is extinct when their very descendants are still around, and the descendants could have mated with the old group to pass on their advantageous traits. Think about that for a few minutes.

3.Fossilised footprints

Dinosaur footprints, slug footprints, Australopithecus footprints and other footprints on top of any layer in the strata means that layer was at the top of the stack long enough for something to walk on top of it before it got covered by subsequent layers and hardened into solid rock.

That’s certainly an interesting point which adds weight to the previous point about layers on top being newer than the layers below. But otherwise it is just stating a plain fact. I want to emphasise that I’m looking for any logic behind these evidences which would only make sense within the narrative of evolutionary theory. These reasons so far are just stating geological processes that take place and don’t by themselves help the evolutionary progression of living organisms, much less make any more sense under the lens of evolution.

4.Fossils

The process of permineralization, where mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms, provides us with a vast quantity of fossils that give us an idea of the different forms life has taken in the past.

It’s certainly true that the fossil record does highlight the sorts of life that have existed on Earth with a caveat that the record is only a fraction of all organisms that have every lived on Earth. I find the phrasing very interesting in this point “different forms life has taken”. It drips with the evolutionary narrative as it assumes populations of previous organisms gave rise to populations of new organisms. My gripe here is why are we starting under the mindset of evolutionary theory? I want to make a point here that all scientific theories have to be explained by natural physical causes. If water boils, it is because the particles gained enough energy through heat to move faster and become gas. It can’t be because God’s Will permits water to boil when it reaches the right temperature. In this case both scenarios result in the same thing as far as scientists are concerned: the phenomena that water boils at a certain temperature. So even though theists believe that God’s Will is behind everything from law of gravity to an individual’s capacity to excrete waste, for the sake of understanding patterns in nature scientists limit themselves to studying the causes of observed phenomena. Gravity is an essential property of objects with mass, and an individual is able to excrete by virtue of his rectal muscles. These causes that we observe aren’t an illusion hence why science has been able to progress as it has. It is just that we make a grave error when not being mindful of the One who is responsible for the order and perfection we witness in our universe and not giving acknowledgement of this order to God, since at any time he can change the observed order as he wishes. So the order we observe isn’t independent of God’s Will on it.

So with regards to evolution, naturalistic pressures and causes have to be cited as explanations for the phenomena we observe in nature from the structure of an animal’s organs to its mating rituals. This is where Dobzhansky’s quote is relevant. According to evolutionists, these multitude of facts about living things seem disaparate and random without any guiding principle. But under the lens of “surviving to reproduce” everything in biology is reduced to serve this fundamental aim that evolutionists think organisms have as their telos or purpose. Whereas on the other hand creationists observe these facts of organisms and are awed by the intelligence and wisdom of the Creator. Essentially the universe and everything in it are symbols and signs that showcase the existence of a powerful, compassionate, and wise Creator. This along with the Messengers He has sent gives us ample reason to believe in His existence and therefore right to be acknowledged for the phenomena that we observe in our universe.

5.Fossils of exitinct species

We have lots and lots and lots of fossils of species that don’t exist anymore. Lots and lots and lots of them in just the superorder Dinsosauria alone.

Yes dinosaurs used to exist and? ,_,

6.The law of faunal succession

You will never find a Neanderthal bone in the same stratum as a Tyrannosaurus rex bone. Tyronnosaurus rexes weren’t alive at the same time; therefore, their stratum didn’t get laid down at the same time.

This is basically the same point as the law of superposition, older species will be found in older deeper rock layers. The fossils found in a particular rock layer can be used as a means to estimate the age of the rock. Some creationists consider this to be circular reasoning when this isn’t the case (we know the age of the fossils because the age of the rocks is known, so the age of the rocks is the age of the fossil). Before the advent of radiometric dating, the best geologists could do was differentiate between older and younger rock layers. They couldn’t assign a measure of how old in years the layers were. Then using radiometric dating which uses known radioactive decay models in physics the ages of the rock could be calculated and by inference the age of the fossils within the rocks. So once all of this dating had been done, and a particular fossil is found (say a T-rex thigh bone) we can assume the age of the rock, since all the leg work had been done in previous decades to map the ages of the rocks and fauna. Of course if we wanted evidence for our assumption then we can do a radiometric dating method.

7.Seashell fossils on mountaintops

Benjamin Franklin saw that there were fossilized sea shells on top of the mountains of Appalachia, some of them imprinted into solid rock, and concluded, “Tis certainly the Wreck of a World we live on!” The shells were deposited in layers on the Ocean floor over millions of years, layers that would be violently broken up and rippled into a mountain range 480,000,000 years ago by a catastrophic earthquake.

Again this is just stating a piece of geological history. However it is interesting to think about. When I first read this I thought “isn’t this evidence for a Great Flood?”. This could certainly account for seashells on the mountain tops as the mountains would have been underwater allowing a variety of sea life to find itself on the mountains when the waters receded. Once the waters receded the seashells on the mountains got covered up and then fossilisation preserved them. The way it seems that author understood the origin of these seashells was that through massive earthquakes, the sea bed literally broke and rippled into a mountain range about half a billion years ago. I’m not suggesting that this didn’t happen. But when I thought more on whether this is evidence for a flood, I realised that the time stamp for this event gives us more things to consider. If this is indeed the Great Flood of Noah then that suggests humans have been around for at least half a billion years when the modern scientific consensus is 100 thousand years.

We are taught in scriptures that Noah is the great grandson of Adam, so basically there have been 4 to 6 generations of people so far and then you have the time between Noah and us. Basically a time span of 100 thousand years makes more sense than half a billion. I want to stress that I don’t really know either way.

But I want to point out that at this point in Earth’s history is when fish and plants are observed in the fossil record though no major land animal groups are seen at this point.

Interesting geological fact. I don’t see how this is specific evidence for evolution nor how it doesn’t make sense without evolution. However of course this is evidence for a changing Earth and that different regions of Earth would have had different environments at different points in time, which any extant animals would have to live in. These changes though are extremely slow, so I doubt any species actually experienced those changes in their own timescale therefore there wouldn’t have been changing selection pressures in the generational timescale but rather at the centuries scale when populations of species now have to cope with different temperatures and conditions than ancestors centuries ago which would quickly select for individuals suited to the fesh environment. This would look something like changing physical traits directly related with the environment such as fur length and color or sleeping habits, but would probably not have caused a significant pressure on the biochemistry of the organisms.

9.Same fossils on both sides of the Atlantic

Snider-Pellegrini Wegener fossil map

There are matching fossils on both sides of where the continents appear to have split apart. Cynognathus, a Triassic land reptile, fossils are found in South America and Africa. The Triassic era was between 250,000,000 and 200,000,000 years ago.

This reason is actually great evidence for the theory that the continents were together at one point in time and have since split due to continental drift. The fossil distributions as well as how the continents fit together are great clues as to how the continetns fit together. Again this makes sense perfectly without even considering evolution, and this point is actually evidence for the supercontinent theory.

I suppose the author assumed these reasons scream evolution to any rational thinking mind. I hate to break to you man that they don’t.

10.Radiometric dating

Take a quantity of uranium-238 and in 4.5 billion years half of it will have turned into lead-206. When molten rock hardens into a solid, the uranium-238 within it begins to decay. By comparing the ratio of uranium-238 to lead-206, we can estimate how old the rock is. The same thing can be done with Samarium-neodymium, Potassium-argon, Rubidium-strontium, and Uranium-thorium transitions.

That’s cool ,_, again stating a method doesn’t mean it has relevancy to the theory of evolution directly. Within the context of dating species is when this point has relevancy.

11.Radiocarbon dating

Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. There is a semi-constant ratio of carbon-14 in the air and ocean as it is constantly being created by cosmic rays. Plants take in carbon from the atmosphere and ocean and fix it into themselves. Animals eat plants and fix the carbon into themselves. By measuring the ratio of carbon-14 in a younger fossil, scientists can estimate its age.

I’m sorry but does the author understand what evidence means? I suggest you read or watch Sherlock Holmes. Evidence is a fact or observation which is a piece of the larger picture. With lots of evidence we start to see the picture of the world. What that picture ultimately represents can be debated but essentially all or most evidences have to match a particular narrative known as a theory. Theories tend to be big and multi-faceted. Experiments and studies focus on aspects of this picture by testing out hypotheses. A hypoothesis seeks to find out the reality of a particular aspect of the picture. Is it this or that? The experiment collects results which help determine the phenomena that is happenning. The results and interpretation of the experiment then either lends support to the overall narrative and makes more sense within that narrative, or is a serious flaw to the theory. In this case, each individual experiment and the results obtained are very concrete, and if repeated become very reliable observations. Then the theory or whole picture is modified, either in a positive sense as in new information is added to the picture or new avenues of research open up to gather more observations to rectify a faulty picture.

But to reiterate, reason 11 just states a dating method and does not directly shed light on the truth of evolution as an explanation for how we came to be.

We must show respect to our great ancestors in these rocks (‘_’) the bacteria.

Ok the previous 13 questions dealt with the age of the earth and its fossils. The next section will deal with genetics. As a preface to the last section the author writes “We live on a very old Earth”. Well now the last 13 reasons make more sense in what he was trying to point out. This is of course true, and I did agree how these observations and methods demonstrate the fact that the earth is several billion years old. This plays into the evolutionary narrative in two significant ways. First as a brutal fact, the age of the Earth allows us to accept that a lot of things have happened, and that the sheer number of generations of organisms required for the theory of evolution to work requires a sheer amount of time, and apparently 4 billion years is a satisfactory amount of time for species to diverge and diversify. I totally disagree that the amount of time the Earth has been around is even close to the amount time needed for even one species to morph to another (when you have taken into account the vast number of precise differences).

This article is long enough as it is so I’m going to deal with the other sections in due time. I may do an article on each section of the 101 reasons list. Depends on how long each article gets. I think that I made good points for each reason as well as addressed certain issues within the whole narrative of evolution.

If you felt I missed a point then feel free to let me know in the comments and explain how any of the reasons actually support the theory of evolution. Leave a like if you enjoyed reading the article and please consider subscribing to be notified when the next article comes out.

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2 Comments

Anonymous

March 28, 2017

I though exactly the same thing… most of these certainly do not prove evolution, they are just hijacked facts… to prove evolution one would need 2 experiments.. 1 that turns matter into the living and 1 that turns a species into something recognizably new to everyone (i.e. macro that ends the micro argument) and lets face it, none of these come anywhere close.

The thing is when you look at a few aspects or one animal species or one kind of change such as changes in the frequencies of genes then you could possibly fall into the trap of extrapolating this to cover everything we see.

But when you stop to consider the minute differences between one species and another and not just (the position of the blow hole) but its longevity, its mating seasons and behaviour, its diet, its DNA, you start to realise that it is silly to focus on one trait such as the abilty to be totally swimming in water (the idea that a 4 legged animal evolved into a whale) because you are changing not only the skeletal structure (which is what they use as evidence for this hypothesis) but you are changing the whole lifestyle of the animal and none of this gets accounted for. Like whales are pregnant for two years and can live for 60-90 years. These 4 legged rodents that the whale supposedly evolved from would have completely different longevities, and mating cycles and pregnancy cycles. These multiple factors which have to change and evolve compound the problem of the number of generations needed to morph from one species to another. Also evolutionary biologisists never consider generation times. If they say one species evolved into another in 10 million years, and a generation comes about every 10 years (as one possibility) then basically they are saying in 1 million generations a species has completely changed its skeletal structure, its habitat, eating habits, mating seasons, longevity and other traits. And the number of actual changes can be counted in the millions, which means a handful of changes had to occur and fix in the population every generation.

But do I see this logic played out? No, because they are too comfortable with their “explanations” to really understand. I’ll give a quick example. Let’s say I put a pot of water on a fire and I boil the water. A materialist will say: the boiling water was caused by energy input from the heat of the fire which in itself was produced by combustion of the wood to create the fire. But they do not allow themselves to wonder or accept that how does something like fire with its special properties come to exist in the first place, and why is matter built up from particles. And they don’t realise that the fire burns and the water boils with God’s permission and will. The rain comes down with his will and water evaporates with his will. The earth rotates with his will, and ships stay floating with his will. But they don’t “see” this so “it’s not reality”. Yet they experience so many things that are intangible and not based on materials.